In 1892, George and Weedon Grossmith published a comic novel about an odd little fellow called Charles Pooter. Pooter was a clerk, struggling with the world around him, his family, and the pressures of fitting in to Victorian society. His comedic self-importance is thwarted at every turn by social misfortune and petty grievances. The book was called The Diary of a Nobody.
We have had to wait 123 years for anything to rival The Diary of a Nobody, but the publication of Norman Baker’s Against the Grain comes very close. If you ever wanted to read a book which tells you the voting figures for the election in the Telscombe division of East Sussex County Council in 1989, then this is for you. The high drama of the decision-making process to design a new logo for East Sussex county council is told in a style worthy of Robert Caro. The titanic struggle conducted by Baker to get a key to open the windows in the Home Office, in the face of bureaucratic obstruction, easily rivals Foot’s account of Bevan and the NHS.
We are treated to the insights that once Norman Baker went in a cherry picker, had to tell a young person how to leave a note for the milk man, ran a campaign against the Hansard reporters to write ‘government are’ instead of ‘government is’, was once banned from the Lewes Conservative club, and brought a bike through the gates of Downing Street, although unlike Andrew Mitchell, nothing untoward happened.
The things Baker thinks he will be remembered for are discussed in detail: his role in the second resignation of Peter Mandelson over the Hinduja affair; and his belief that the official account of the death of David Kelly is ‘frankly incredible’ and ‘unexplained’. On the first, it is curious that despite his central role, Norman Baker is not mentioned by name in either Tony Blair’s or Peter Mandelson’s accounts of the resignation. Obviously some kind of oversight. And on Kelly, despite his lengthy protestations that he is not a ‘conspiracy theorist’ and his sideswipes at ‘Blairite’ David Aaronovitch who put Baker’s theories to the test, all we are left with is a sense that Baker’s choice of headgear might be manufactured by Bacofoil.
Baker is admirably clear that he owed his position as Liberal Democrat member of parliament for Lewes thanks to ‘tactical voting’ whereby people who consider themselves Labour, or Green, vote for the Lib Dem to keep out the Tory. He says ‘tactical voting had been crucial to the Tories losing the seat’ and admits that ‘I was immensely helped by a segment of the Labour party locally.’ I was witness to this myself, when as the Labour party’s parliamentary candidate for Lewes in 2001 (and proud supporter of the government), I was soundly beaten by Norman Baker (fierce left wing critic).
Of course what the electorate gives, the electorate takes away. Once it was clear that Baker was not really ‘against the grain’ at all, but in reality a ministerial prop to the Conservative-led government, the non-Conservative section of the electorate understandably withdrew their support. In 2015 ‘Labour voters in large numbers abandoned tactical voting.’
Baker writes about his sense of frustration at losing the seat: ‘It is astonishing how some highly intelligent people cannot seem to get their heads around what is after all a pretty simple electoral system.’ In this case, the people of Lewes understood all too well what they were doing: getting rid of an MP who had played to the left, but when offered a Red Box, enthusiastically joined a Tory-led Government.
Charles Pooter has delighted readers for over a century. ‘Pooterish’ has come to mean taking oneself far too seriously, and believing that one’s importance or influence is far greater than it really is. In Norman Baker, Pooter lives.
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Paul Richards is author of Labour’s Revival: The Modernisers’ Manifesto. He tweets @LabourPaul
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Against The Grain
Norman Baker
BiteBack Publishing | 432pp | £20.00